synaptic crashes/hangs when virtual keyboards are loaded

[aharon cohen]

xubuntu 13.10
synaptic 0.80.2
onboard 0.99.0-0ubuntu1

synaptic crashes / hungs when onboard (virtual keyboard) is running.
tested also with another virtual keyboard florence, ans synaptic crashes / hungs again.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: synaptic 0.80.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-12.19-generic 3.11.3
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2.1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 25 02:48:31 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-11-23 (335 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Release amd64 (20121017.1)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: synaptic
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-10-18 (6 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Richard Schneiderman (rschneiderman)]

My experience is that synaptic is very very slow, it does come back up after a while. Once onboard is closed, then synaptic is back to normal. I did notice that my cpu on a dual core was 100% on one processor.

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

The problem is still happening with version 0.80.4 shipping with the development version of Ubuntu trusty. I am going back to version 0.75 of Synaptic that does not have that problem.

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

I have read in the following duplicate thread that the problem is due because synaptic calls gtk_tree_view_set_model of gtk-3.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/onboard/+bug/1264315

This probably also explains why the problem does not occur in synaptic 0.75: it still uses gtk2.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

I can reproduce this too. Starting up synaptic while Onboard is running takes around 2 minutes, without Onboard 3 seconds.

All the stalling seems to happen in gtk_tree_view_set_model in RGMainWindow::refreshTable. It looks innocent enough, but apparently this instantiates 44000+ accessibles and for each one "state-changed" and "text-changed" signals are emitted via D-Bus.

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

The problem is still occurring with synaptic version 0.81.1 currently shipping with the development version of ubuntu trusty. Thus, I am back to using synaptic 0.75 on trusty.